Postcript on Week 6

I have to say that in running the workshop for all the years that I did, there was a spectrum of ages, and a spectrum of abilities, and a spectrum in terms of absorbing new ideas. As this course progresses we introduce new ideas and different people can cope with them in different ways. Some people I found in the workshop, if I had a new idea, I had to keep repeating it week after week to consolidate it. Others got the new idea immediately and could see its point and could integrate it in their playing. So it’s going to be different for different people.

Really what I want to say here is take out of the sessions what you can and if you find that some of them sometimes are too challenging then don’t worry too much about it. So, for example, if you’ve got II-V-I in a minor key then just play over the Dorian mode and if some of the notes don’t quite fit live with that for the moment. But then maybe at a later date go back and see if you can make some progress with the scale theory. I’ve given you the scale theory at this stage, in some sense, for completeness but, you know, it’s something I have absorbed over many many years.

So it’s asking you a lot to become proficient in all these ideas in the space of just a few weeks.